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France (Noir sur Blanc), Croatia (Fraktura)

About

Juri Andruchowytsch has invested a lot of time in familiarising himself with foreign cities. In some of them, he got stuck for a while. Others have become true parts of his life: »Munich begins right behind Moscow, the alphabet is in harmony with time« – that’s because Munich was the first German city the young author from the failing Soviet Union visited in order to write his Moscoviada not far from it, at Lake Starnberg.

Diamond cutters instead of cinnamon stores - an alley in Antwerp, a sociology of street music in Berlin. Being with Andrzej Stasiuk in the one hundred-storeyed InterContinental in Bucharest. A visit to the tragic museum in Kharkiv, walking through deserted gardens in Detroit. Novi Sad. Odessa. Paris. Prague. Stuttgart. Toronto. Uzhgorod. Venice. An alphabet of 44 cities on three continents.

The present volume is a collection of 39 texts chosen by the author from the original 111 city-portraits published under the title Leksykon intymnych mist with Meridian Czernowitz in Kiev. Together with his translator, the author has revised these texts and, where applicable, updated them.

Praise

»Reading this book is akin to a voyage of discovery.« Judith Leister, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»The ABC of these cities is as individual as it is informative and entertaining.« Gerhard Zeillinger, der Standard

»Andruchowytsch is one author you happily let lead you astray…In this encyclopaedia of cities you learn more about the author than the places themselves. And that’s a good thing – not least because of the wonderfully funny and factual stories that emerge from the writing life.« Carmen Eller, Die literarische Welt

»As of yet, almost no one has written such an incredibly wide-ranging and particular, sharp and laconic, casually chatty and intimately touching memoir of their travels to various cities.« Heike Krause-Leipoldt, Lesart 3/2016